Friday, July 30, 2010

I've just finished reading a blog post by Scott from Pumping Irony on the Guild Wars 2 leveling info released by Arena.net earlier today. For those that haven't read it yet, Arena.net have announced the level cap for Guild Wars 2 will be 80. As Scott pointed out, this seems like an awfully diku WoW inspired move by Arena.net. I'm not entirely inclined to agree. What I'd like to point out is that we still don't know what gaining a level in GW2 will actually means. For example, do we gain attribute points per level? I still haven't read any info released from Arena.net that suggests there are even going to be attribute points. What restrictions does the level of your character put on game play? Again, we still don't know yet. How long does it take to reach the max level? Until we get more information, the level cap might as well be 5000. It makes no difference.

What we do know, is that level progression will be linear and not exponential like most MMOs. That gets my tick of approval. Did we learn any other new information from the latest post aside from the cap being 80? Nope, not really. So the only thing I'm upset about with the latest blog post from Arena.net, is that there really wasn't much information in the post.

It would seem odd to me that Arena.net would move away from the winning leveling formula they had with GW1. If I had to guess, I would say that your level will only restrict the XP you get from kills. Same as in GW1. This forces players to move through the story/game if they want to progress the level of their character. Given the amount of design changes so far with GW2, it's best not to assume to much. So in conclusion, I only have to say this:

Saturday, July 24, 2010

It's been well over 6 months since I last posted here on the blog. I will explain why, but the short answer is that time constraints caused me to have a lifestyle change.

Just after Christmas (now 6 months ago) my girlfriend and I moved in with her parents to save money for a our own house. This threw a bit of a spanner into the works of my daily gaming routine. My gf's parents house is located 1.5 hrs travel time away from both mine and my gf's work. Essentially my gf and I were getting up at 5:30am for work and getting home around 7:30pm. Once dinner was cooked I'd get about an hour and a half of gaming in before I needed to be asleep ready for the next day. Shortly after starting this routine, my gf decided that she wanted to start doing a TV writing course after work. The downside to this, is that we catch the train home. Her classes wouldn't finish until 9pm at night, which meant she would have to catch the late train home. Unfortunately our train line has some shady characters around and it gets even worse the later you catch it. So of course I had to wait around and catch the train with her to ensure her safety. This meant that I had a gap between 5:30pm and 9pm after work where I would do nothing. I couldn't play games because my gaming rig was 1.5 hrs away. What was I to do? On our second late train home of this routine, we encountered a rather aggressive young fellow who was insistent on smoking a joint on the train while punching windows randomly (seriously wtf?). Anyway it scared the crap out of both of us and I decided that if we would continue this routine, I would need to learn some self defense. So I signed up to a Karate class after work which filled the void nicely. So for the last 6 months or so I've been training Kyokushin Karate four days of the week, as well as going to the gym. You can imagine the change in fitness/body shape going from a regular gaming geek who does very little exercise to a full fledged killing machine...

Let's just say, I don't worry about the crazy people on our train line any more.

With all this going on, I started to lose touch with gaming and the blog-o-sphere in general. Oddly I didn't actually tell anyone about it either. Poor Melf was probably wondering where the hell I disappeared to. Cheers Melf for keeping the blog going btw.

Unfortunately there is a downside to doing anything excessively, and that's 'burnout' (yes it happens in the real world too!). All the exercise was becoming physically taxing and it lead to some minor injuries. Mostly neck and back problems. I knew there would need to be another change in my lifestyle or else I would hammer myself into a wall. So a middle ground was found. I now do karate two nights of the week and gaming on the other nights. My gf has also adjusted her night classes to fit this schedule. She's so awesome :)

So what game did I start playing again once I started getting back into gaming? Guild Wars. All this talk about GW2 has me excited about MMO gaming again. Plus I still think Guild Wars is the best MMO available at the moment. It was weird firing it back up after over a year of inactivity. A couple of weeks back into it, I organized a 3 day LAN with Melf, his gf and the brother of my gf. I started a Mesmer and relived the good times of starting a character from scratch. GW is so awesome, and it's great fun gaming with friends! You can expect some more posting on Guild Wars to come, but for now, lets just say:

Thursday, July 22, 2010

Tuesday, July 20, 2010

A few months ago I attempted to play League of Legends (LoL). I am quite a fan of the Defense of the Ancients (DotA) style of arena-based RPG formula. However at the time I could not manage to actually get past the LoL game launcher due to some apparent retardicity in said launcher. After about half an hour attempting to make the game work I gave up thinking, "fine, it's a free game made by some amateurs turned pro, they need some time to iron out the kinks. I'll try again some time in the future."

Fast forward to ten minutes ago, where I saw an advert that their first proper competitive season is about to start up and that now is the time to jump on the bandwagon. Splendid! I attempt to log on to the website:

Right. Clearly I must have got this far last time. Seeing as how I used my generic gamer name, I'm sure I used my generic gamer password too:

Hmmm. No, I haven't forgotten, but oh well. Let's just reset the password so we can get on with playing this reportedly fantastic game:

If you can't even make a basic website that will let me download the game, I'm not going to entrust you with any more of my time. My game time is already quite limited, as evidenced by the solidly put together couple of dozen or so games just sitting not even installed in my Steam catalogue because of the veritable gaming smorgasbord that we are provided with these days. LoL? Yes, I think I will LoL in your general direction now.

Monday, July 5, 2010

From the words "this is the trooper.... he'll be our main tank" there was a sinking feeling in my gut. It was all downhill from there. I'm trying to decide whether the Jedi "holding aggro" is more of a slap in the face to the Star Wars legacy, or whether the honour goes to the smuggler throwing "light heals" around.

Luke: I'm excited for that new Bioware game.Obi-Wan: That's no Bioware game. It's a space WoW.Han: Bioware are too awesome to make a space WoW.Luke: I have a very bad feeling about this.Chewie: Unnggggghhh.